At Binbir Çiçek Montessori Kindergarten, each child has a developmental assessment folder. We believe that this method is a wonderful way to record the skills, achievements, and rapid changes in development that each child experiences during the preschool years. Since children complete much of their learning process through play, it can be quite challenging to track small changes in their development through observation alone.
These developmental assessments cover four main areas of our children's development. These areas include physical and motor development (fine and gross motor), consisting of skills such as walking, balancing, using scissors, holding a pencil correctly, writing, and stacking blocks; social and emotional development, which includes items such as communicating with other children and adults, developing self-confidence, following and obeying instructions, and respecting others' personal space; intellectual and mathematical development, including the ability to identify letters and numbers, reading, recognizing shapes and colors, and academic development that can be measured by items such as interest in books, creating patterns, and classifying concepts.
Although the Montessori system does not grade students or create report cards at the end of each year, we ensure that our children's intellectual, social, and emotional development is progressing correctly by continuously observing and evaluating them, as Dr. Maria Montessori also emphasized. Testing and grading tend to dull this natural intrinsic motivation for learning, as they focus on competing with peers and the importance of getting good grades rather than the process of learning itself.
In mixed-age classrooms, our children can observe each other, and younger children can learn how to do a task by simply watching older ones, without feeling pressured to keep up with the rest of the class.
Since each child is evaluated as an individual, and individual attention is given to each child, our teachers can help our children surpass themselves or provide them with additional support when needed. Our children do not have to 'wait for the rest of the class to catch up' to master a skill or concept they want to develop, so they do not feel punished when they cannot receive a new lesson in extra time.
Our certified Montessori teachers spend hours in in-service training on how Montessori studies should be conducted, as well as on how student observations should be made, recorded, and interpreted. These student measurements and evaluations are done through the following methods:
To track a child's developmental process, our classroom teachers work in collaboration with the school psychologist and the school counselor. Our teachers continuously observe our children in daily life and report these observations to the school psychologist when necessary. Additionally, the school psychologist observes each child in their natural environments during class hours or garden hours and makes measurements using highly reliable and valid developmental inventories suitable for the preschool period, taking notes on the progression of development skills throughout the year. At the end of all these measurements and evaluations, meetings are arranged with the family to discuss the child's developmental process if deemed necessary.